Money Doesn't Change Most Candidates

Bethlehem is a beautiful little city of about 75,000 people in Pennsylvania. I went to college there and love it. Over the past 25 years, the city has made incredible progress. It was a dying steel town in the early 1990's when Bethlehem Steel left the city for greener pastures. In the time since then, they developed their downtown Main Street area into a collection of restaurants, shops, bars, and historic sites. They re-developed the former Steel lands, using a casino to get the infusion of capital, but then adding a mix of retail, non-profits, the arts, and public leisure space. Now they are talking about re-developing the Martin Tower area, the former corporate HQ for Bethlehem Steel, and making it into the next re-birth in Bethlehem. The building has been empty for 15 years, and it's high time they blow that relic to everything wrong with Bethlehem Steel Corporation right off the map.

Of course there is opposition, particularly from some of the merchants down on Main Street who have been around about 20 years now, and don't want any more new competition to them coming into the city. A new anti-development wing has emerged in city politics, opposing the basic idea of urban growth and re-development. They think the city is too generous with developers, and want it to stop. Of course, they think the developers buy influence through campaign contributions, and so they want to put in place tighter ethics rules than the state or city currently have, so they can force anyone who took a campaign contribution from a developer to not vote on development issues.

Money doesn't generally impact the views of politicians. It's a comforting thought to say that your opponent doesn't have any real values, ethics, or morals, and only supports their position because they were bought off, but it is generally ignorant to why people run for office in the first place. I don't care if we're talking about City Council or Congress, people run for office generally because they support or oppose the government they have. When people enter the race for Congressman Dent's seat next year, they will do so either to support Donald Trump and Paul Ryan, or to oppose them. The same is generally true locally. Every Bethlehem Mayor over the past 25 years has supported a "pro-urban growth" agenda, which is to say that they believe when a property is not productive in any way, they have wanted to re-develop that land. When people entered the race for City Council in Bethlehem, they either generally entered as a supporter of the incumbent Mayor of that time, or against them. They started out generally, philosophically, in support of re-development projects, or not. When developers donated to these candidates that support development, they didn't do so to change their mind- they did so because they wanted that perspective on the council. That is entirely within their first amendment right.

In the case of 99% of campaign contributions, the contributions are a reward for existing views, not a bribe to change them. When Planned Parenthood PAC gives money to Democratic candidates for Congress, or the NRA to Republicans, they do so under the expectation that these candidates already support their political causes, even when the candidate has no government voting record yet to judge from. The support for the political positions the donor wants comes before the contribution, not because of the contribution. There are rare cases where that is not true, such as the whole Allentown mess, and those people typically end up going to jail. Generally speaking though, the overwhelming majority of cases are that donations don't change a person's views on a political issue, they follow them.

I get why people like to believe the concept that money corrupts their political opponent's views- it's comforting to think that you have the moral high ground, and not just a political position that must be argued and defended. If your opponent is just a bought off shill, you don't have to think about the merits of what they are saying, or think about the repercussions of your plan's actions. Saying something like "Senator X only supports industry Y because of the $___ they received from them" makes your opponent seem dirtier and corrupt, but the truth is that 99% of the time it's a pile of pony loaf. Beyond that though, if you have an elected official who has received no money from any industry of any kind, you should be asking yourself what it is they are doing in office? Businesses create jobs, and people having jobs is good. This idea that every business is bad and corrupt is a political idea that should die a quick death- it's nothing more than a sound bite that actually does more harm than good.

In this case, I happen to think Bethlehem is much better off because of the development the city has encouraged over the past 25 years. The city could have went either way coming out of the Steel era, and it's now the jewel of the Lehigh Valley. The city does not have an ethics issue, it simply has a council that supports growth and re-development projects. If there are people who don't support growth and re-development projects, they should run against the council people in place. A woman is doing that this year as a write-in, and one of the current council people even supports her. That's the democratic process in action, which is good. The place to settle these philosophical differences is at the ballot box, not by putting a stronger ethics rule in place. That's solving a problem the city does not have.